Microcontroller-based automated billing system

This paper presents an integrated single board automated measurement and billing system for public utilities (electricity, water, gas, and telephone services). The proposed system is composed of hardware and software structures. The hardware structure consists of a digital energy meter module, a digital water (gas) meter module and a telephone call meter module, all of which are interfaced to a single chip microcontroller. The system is equipped with a credit card reading capability to read and charge automatically the customer´s services consumption on site. Also, all service metering modules are facilitated with an automatic service connection and disconnection based on the available credit. The software structure commands the whole process via the microcontroller input/output ports. The integrated system was implemented and tested, and has proven to be stable, reliable and easy to maintain